Over lunch today I read a story on the winners and losers at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In this story, Sue Marek of FierceWireless took time to reflect on what she and other editorial team members saw at the show. The article discusses the winners and losers in five areas:
- US Operators
- Handsets
- Infrastructure Vendors
- App Stores
- Operating Systems
What I find interesting about the list is not so much who the winners and losers are perceived to be, but the fact that App Stores made the list as a category. I haven’t taken to time to look back and see if they did a similar story last year, but if they did they could not have even had App Stores on the list. Do you know why? None of them existed. In less than a year, the iPhone App Store has emerged from non-existence to offer 15,000 applications which have collectively been downloaded over 500 million times. The Android Market has much fewer applications, but millions of downloads already.
Applications are becoming a key part of what people are looking for on their mobile devices. We are just at the beginning of this wave in mobility. It will be interesting to see who the winners and losers in mobile applications are next year.